


paint me a paradise on the shit-covered floor

by Hazzafagga



Category: One Direction
Genre: Aerosmith, Bottom!Harry, Burning Down the House, Catholicism, Child Abuse, College AU, College/High School, Crazy, Dom!Harry, Drugs, Emotional Abuse, F/F, F/M, Frotting, Gay, Gen, Harry Styles - Freeform, Homophobia, Homosexual slurs, Liam Payne - Freeform, Louis Tomlinson - Freeform, M/M, Niall Horan - Freeform, Original Characters - Freeform, Original Female Characters - Freeform, Original Male Characters - Freeform, Physical Abuse, Polygamy, Power Bottom, Public Nudity, Public Sex, Riding, Sixth Form, Smut, Soulmates, Sub!Louis, The Smiths - Freeform, Trigger Warnings, Virginity, Weed, Zayn Malik - Freeform, alternative, alternative!harry, bitter sweet, blowjob, college!louis, everything will be alright in the end album, footie!louis, future scope trilogy, gemma styles - Freeform, hippie!harry, larry - Freeform, larry stylinson - Freeform, louis is religious, one direction - Freeform, pansexuality, pork and beans, subtop!louis, talking heads, the kitten was a real kitten called elsa, top!Louis, verb abuse, weezer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-21 22:05:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7406893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hazzafagga/pseuds/Hazzafagga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>harry and louis have always been nervous to talk to each other, but with growing up comes finding oneself and the ability to overcome doubt. the two boys don't know it, and might not ever, but they've been endlessly drawn together for a reason that was so goddamn obvious.</p><p>or the one where harry and louis set out to bathe a dying kitten in dirty water before it is reincarnated as something amazing. making love in public isn't that weird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	paint me a paradise on the shit-covered floor

**Author's Note:**

> dedicated to precious baby Elsa.
> 
> inspired by photos by ig's @boy.moans (formerly known as @mothers.milk)
> 
> myth - beach house  
> destruction of the disgusting ugly hate - soko  
> don't you touch me- soko

“Point the light on me, I can't see,” Harry said, hopping up onto the gate as I shined the flashlight for him, glorifying his naked entirety under the moon and stars.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Harry Styles when I first met him. He was very quiet. I wasn't sure if he had friends and I wasn't sure if he talked. I had never heard him mutter a word of most of the years I've known him. When we were eight or nine years old, I thought that maybe he was shy since he didn't like to play with the other kids. I remember well one day of primary school he raised his hand for the toilet – put up one finger for the nurse's station, two for a restroom break, three to sharpen your pencil, four to emergency–ring your parents, and five to ask or answer a question. He never put up five fingers because he never had a question or an answer. On this day he went to use the washroom, but he didn't come back for a long time. No one seemed to notice; not even Miss Neilson who had signed him out on the ladybug clipboard. After watching his empty seat for ten minutes, I raised two fingers and went down to the toilet by the art room.

I walked in slowly, made sure the heel of my shoes didn't clap the tile as I wandered. I closed myself in a stall and sat on the toilet, my trousers on and everything, and peered down under the divider.

Harry was sat on the floor in the last stall. He was drawing on the tiles with watercolour paints and had been cleaning his brush in the toilet, twirling his hand round inside and tapping it off on the rim. He might have even used blood from the scab on his knee for red when he ran out after a while.

I returned to the lesson shortly afterward, and Miss Neilson had yet realised that Harry was still gone.

Often times I think about what might have happened if Harry heard me come into the washroom that day. Would he have looked underneath the stall, too, to catch me spying on him? Would he have quickly scrubbed away the evidence of his colourful presence with the cheap toilet tissue and rushed back to our class without confronting me? Or would he have opened the stall door to knock on mine and invite me to see what sort of masterpiece he aspired to make? I'm sure now, though, he knew I was there. He must have known. He has exquisite hearing.

After year four, he moved away to Cheshire. Nobody missed him. I'm not even certain anybody recalled his name or his face. He never spoke to anyone, so I'm practically positive that when he left, he wasn't leaving anyone important behind.

Nine years passed since I'd last heard the name Harry Styles. During the remaining few minutes of my American literature course, Mister Gates welcomed in a new student as half the class was lain on their desks sleeping. I was one of the other half.

He introduced the new pupil as Harry who wasn't at all the same person as the one I knew once. This one had dark hair and sinful, sun–kissed skin. The other had had lighter hair – almost blond – and a complexion so bright and untouched he could confuse me at times for the girl with the straight fringe who sat across me at lunchtime. The Harry who stood at the doorway, hands in his pockets, long, uncombed hair pulled back in a headband hiding a braid or two, was a different human. I really didn't think he could be the same boy I spotted painting on the toilet floor, but squinting my eyes and looking sideways, I found that it was. He hadn't changed a bit.

Apart from my American literature course, he had no classes with me. I saw him in the schoolyard from time to time. Some days I walked past him in the corridor and on the way to my car after college. He never looked at me. His attention was almost always on his feet or the clouds or sounds he heard in the car park.

As I mentioned before, Harry has astounding hearing, and as I also mentioned, he wasn't in any of my courses despite American literature. After a handful of days, however, he turned up in music theory. He was the first to arrive that day – I’m certain it was a Thursday – and I the second.

It was then that he looked at me. It was for a brief moment and I, in fact, turned away first. It was also the day that I heard him speak.

We were asked to name the instruments in the arrangement that Murphy played. We all sat there listening, shouting out instruments as they entered the piece and feeling somewhat ashamed when we were corrected. Precisely 72 seconds into the arrangement, Harry raised his hand with all five fingers and named every instrument to come out of the speaker. He addressed the woodblock and marimba that no one else noticed, but, surprisingly, he was right.

“Here are the pairs for the poetry assignment,” said Mister Gates on the next Friday morning. He grouped together everyone on his list in a boy/girl pattern before running dry of equality and decided, “Harry and Cas. Louis and Niall.”

Though that's what he said, Harry and I found each other across the room, or rather the auditorium, as the class was displaced for the day. He looked away first and stood up to greet Cas.

I'd never been so jealous in my life. For a week straight, I caught myself bullying my 8–year–old being for not knocking on the stall to ask Harry what he was doing painting on the floor. Or if he wouldn't have liked the question, I should have asked why he was always alone and if he wanted to be friends. I have never wanted to be friends with someone so badly. The jealousy that had invited itself unto me weighed me down and the anger I felt gave the sour taste of rotten milk that I so helplessly wanted to spit out. As I was with Niall, Harry was with Cas; a comely girl with pretty peach hair and green eyes that sparkled in the daytime and at night. Harry has green eyes, too, so to get excluded from their conversations and poetic brainstorms and exchanging of phone numbers was inevitable because mine are blue.

On the Friday before winter holiday, we shared our poems with the class. We were to relate to _The Great Gatsby_ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, write about one of many discussed themes of the novel and correctly make examples of rhythm, symbolism, imagery and voice, and possibly enter the later month's poetry contest if Mister Gates commended us.

Niall read ours. We wrote about Jay Gatsby's appalling selflessness: to be so blinded by someone's enthrallments that you could never own a pinch of self-worth ever again. Mister Gates did enjoy it, and he handed me a flyer for the January Peace Poetry Festival.

I don't remember who read long afterwards, but I remember that Harry and Cas stood up half past eleven and were the thirteenth pair to go up.

Harry picked a spot in the front of the room, Cas following like a sheep. He tucked his hair behind one ear as Cas did the same.

She handed their paper to Mister Gates and started to recite the poem from memory. We were amazed by her quiet, smooth voice that then sounded a lot like a creeping black cat if they could speak, like waves that horrifyingly built up and then failed to crash as they settled into foam along sand. And then Harry joined her. The poem was picking up quickly and steadily, which I wasn't prepared for. I wasn't prepared to hear a duet and I wasn't prepared to lose my breath chasing the words that were dripping out of his mouth. I wasn't ready to become tranced and find tears drowning me when such a sick thought occurred to me. I wasn't braced for the shooting headache and upset stomach and disgusting itch in my throat whilst Harry gave his poem inspired by the misfortunes of Jay Gatz himself.

I buried my face in my arms once they finished and everyone began to applaud, laying my head down as Harry and Cas sat and accepted the poetry flyer. I regret hiding. When I stood to leave as we were dismissed, Harry stared at me. I understand I hurt his feelings by supposedly sleeping through his most impressive piece.

My mum tells me not to get mixed up in the wrong crowds. And she tells me this among several things utmost daily: God answers our prayers for patience with opportunities to be patient. She tells me, too, that God welcomes all sinners, which I know she doesn't mean offensively. Mum explained it to me once – that sins are not ordered by the Ten Commandments in Catholicism – that each sin is a sin just like one equals one. I struggled to understand for a long time what she meant by that, but I know now that theft is set in equilibrium to adultery and adultery in equilibrium to murder and so on and that we are all sinners.

When I came back to college after Christmas, I was eighteen. I felt wiser somehow, more open to new things. I hadn't gotten my hair cut during the holiday though I looked terrible because I just didn't feel the need. As well as the hair on my head, the hair on my face and body kept on growing, and I stopped showering until my sister said she could smell me when I walked into her dojo. I was gradually getting sucked into hygiene neglect by one factor: I couldn't get Harry Styles out of my head.

At the Peace Poetry Festival, Niall and I became close friends. We exchanged phone numbers and texted each other when we'd spilt up (when he'd go off to get Chinese food and I'd stumble upon a great Mediterranean stand) and talked about kinship and childhood, what we wanted to do when we were older. He had a fun laugh and eyes like the sort of fire with the most hearty energy. We were hardly inseparable that day.

We entered our poem mid–afternoon and took a walk until they announced the prizes. First prize was £500, a published page in a book and free rides at the festival if you attended; second prize was £300, a published page in a book and free rides; third prize was £150 and a published page; fourth prize was £100 and a published page; fifth prize was a published page. I don't know what I was doing when the winners were announced. I must have been throwing away my food wrappers as I remember standing beside a rubbish bin far from the platform when “ _Paint Me a Paradise_ by Cassidy Lizbeth Sunshine and Harry Styles” blared from the speakers. They had gotten first place and were invited to stage their poem the way they had in class in December. But Harry wasn't there, and Cas couldn't perform it without him.

Niall and I didn't win, after all it was only a course grade we were working for. It still distresses me now wondering why Cas and Harry tried so hard, or if they hadn't, how they ever thought of something as cleverly obvious as a duet. What managed to distress me more was the fact that Harry rejected his half of the prize money. And he, of all people, cowrote a poem touching upon selfishness.

As the year was coming to a slow, tiring end, I still had never spoken a word to Harry. Even as we squeezed past each other in American literature to submit work, we didn't say “pardon me” or “I'm sorry”. We would simply grab the other by the elbow or place a hand on the lower back and take a step to the side just to make sure we wouldn't trample each other's feet. I always paid special attention to Harry's feet. He wore sandals everyday and changed his nail polish twice a week.

On a Tuesday in February, after Harry turned eighteen, he was wearing yellow and green nail polish and an incredibly large tie–dye shirt that was even too big for him. He wore two little Dutch braids on each side of his head and a pair of bleach–damaged shorts. That day as he passed my chair in theory, he reeked of drugs and flora and fauna. I remember this because he brought a stray kitten and a bottle of formula into class, and the kitten smelled as well.

“Harry, why the hell have you got a cat in here?” Murphy asked.

“Someone threw him away.”

“'Threw him away?'”

“He was in the rubbish by the McDonald's.”

“How'd you know that?”

“I have good hearing.”

I smiled to myself as he answered, though if I had known he would look directly at me, I would have turned the other way and pretended to snigger at a memory. But the only memories that I smiled at were of him. He was poisoning my mind, slowly but surely, with all the things I never thought I would think of. I was then interested in the woodblock and the marimba and a different kind of style that I had no articles of clothing to properly pursue besides denim and baseball caps.

I explained before that I never thought that Harry Styles was weird when I met him. Speaking to my mum once about old friends, I learned that Harry and I went to nursery school together whilst she and I looked through the photo box, and in some photos I could spot Harry, chubby, curl–less and blond. I can't say that I'm positive I've never spoken to the boy so far in my story of him. There was a terrifying chance that I could have been close mates with him when I was three, or that I could have bullied the poor, defenseless lad or vice–versa. I have known him my entire life until he moved back to Cheshire when we were eight or so and I had forgotten all about the boy who painted on the filthy, piss–stained floor. But he returned just before we'd all go off to uni. He was like a shiny new toy replacing a lost one.

When Harry came back to Doncaster, he caught eyes as easily as children catch illness. He was the epitome of the '60's teen. Every girl wanted him and every boy wanted to be him and every teacher wanted to bless him with all the knowledge that they could convey. What no one knew – not even me – was that in order to give or take from Harry, you needed to be the epitome of whatever it is you were good at. You needed to be perfect at something, like him, too.

The Tuesday at the middle of February, Harry stopped in front of my moving car.

  
He offered me a forgiving smile, shrugging with apologies as he went round to the passenger door, letting himself in. “I need a ride,” he said, placing his stray kitten in his lap.

“Um...” I couldn't find any words now that I had a chance to say them. “Where to?”

“Cheswold.”

“Cheswold? River Cheswold?”

“Yeah.” He set his seatbelt and tied his half–braided hair into a bun.

Regardless of whether I trusted him in that moment, I drove out of the car park and took a left away from home. My grip on the wheel grew painful the longer he sat beside me in _my_ passenger chair in _my_ car. I asked him why he needed a ride to the river (or exactly; why he asked me to give him one) and his answer was incredible. The abandoned kitten from the garbage was dying, and he couldn't bring himself to bury him, “like trash,” he said.

We stopped at a Chinese buffet to kill some time where he hid the frail animal in his shirt and ordered takeaway for three.

“Are you really eating all that?” I inquired, instantaneously wanting to pull my hair out acknowledging the fact that I, in other words, called him fat.

Either he didn't realise it or decided to ignore my ignorance all together. “No, it's for Niall and Cas.”

“Niall and Cas?”

“You're mates with him, right?”

“Yeah, but when––”

“I didn't want you to have some cheap vibe about me,” he admitted, examining and choosing rolls of sushi. “It would be weird for you if you just took me to Cheswold alone. I stole Niall's number and asked if he wanted to come. He's quite nice. They're getting picked up, so they'll be here in a few with the others.”

I chuckled and ladled some soup. “’Others.’”

“Some mates. You might not know them – they don't go to our college. Pour me some?”

I filled him a bowl of miso soup, my hand shaking under his eyes that stared so very intensely. He raised his container to meet the ladle so that I wouldn't spill anything on the counter, thanking me with a soft smile.

It wasn't long before Niall, Cas and “the others” arrived. They had all come rushing in, loud and bewildering, laughing about something someone said. And when they spotted Harry and I in the queue for fresh rice, they hurried urgently over.

I stepped aside as Cas pulled Harry into a sort of sensual hug. I could feel my face burning in embarrassment which I'm sure everyone noticed. My eyes couldn't break away from them; the way he wrapped his arms round her tiny waist and lifted her off the ground a little, pressing a hastened but sweet kiss on her cheek along a honeyed whisper in her ear that had me sulking for much longer than reasonable. He threw his arm over her shoulders, kissing her head as “the others” wandered off for food. I didn't move. At some point during the scandalous embrace, I had dropped my head, feeling shy and ignored. I felt the way that the boy in the toilets did as he sat on the pinkish, scribbled floor. That boy was not Harry and Harry was not him.

Cas and Niall welcomed themselves into my car after we finished packing the takeaway. I didn't mind them driving with me for they had arrived squeezed into a fantasy 6–seater. But mostly, I didn't mind much because as Niall went to take the passenger side, and Cas had gotten excited to share the back with her post–£500–winning poem partner, Harry redirected him and sat beside me once again. A smile had itself muffling me for a whole minute until I finally grew used to the fact that Harry wanted to be beside no one but me. I couldn't stop myself. I felt attached to him – like I owned him and was entitled to being his greatest mate because I had known him for so long. And it was true. We were three years old; I had known him when he was a chubby, straight–haired blond.

“Hey.”

I took my eyes off the road to look hastily at him. “Hm?”

“Can I put you on the aux?”

“He's mainly just got old music, like, from the '80s,” Niall warned, leaning in between us. “It's all '80s alternative and some, like, Weezer and The Smiths and shit.”

“Right on, man.”

Harry set his palm on my thigh, running his other hand to the back of my jeans and asked me to lift a bit. “A heart attack” were too simple words to describe my shock. He took my phone (he wondered briefly for my passcode) from my back pocket and plugged it in, hitting shuffle straight away. I'm grateful to this very hour that the first song to play was _Burning Down The House_ , which he sang along to.

After stopping for gas, drinks and literal shopping breaks, we drove into the later afternoon with the others – Ane, Steven, Vaine and Sheila who had a Sheila – and the kitten who Harry named Loo. I still contemplate now why he'd named him that and if it had anything to do with me. In other wonderful news about our trip, Harry asked me if he could smoke. Of course I allowed him, thinking my explanation for the cigarette smell I'd soon tell my mum wasn't too bad, but as he pulled out a little bag of weed and some skins, I was suddenly faced with a mightier challenge.

I watched his tongue as it struck out of his mouth to the paper. He licked it slowly, a virtuoso at the art like everything else artistic that he participated in. I heard him play the baby grand piano in the choir room during free period, and after the director heard him, as well, asked if he would like to play the second act of the school show in May. He would have turned down the offer if the mixed treble choir didn't sound as heavenly as they did. A mural at the entrance of the main building had been placed just after he'd enrolled. It was called _Peaces_ by Zayn Malik, Loretta Luce and Harry Styles. A week since he joined us again in Doncaster, he was featured in the college paper where they swooned over his contributions to the school and total optimism. In the photo they used of him, he wore a T–shirt with a fruit pattern you'd see on an outdated kitchen wall, reading “I SPEAK IN TONGUES". His tongue on the skin of his joint was gorgeous.

He kindled it lovingly and gasped it. “You want?” he asked me.

I tried to talk myself out of refusing him, but I couldn't. He shared with Niall and Cas, cracking the windows once the air started to smell. They smoked one joint, and then when Harry conjured up a final one, put a light to it and held it to my mouth.

“Try it,” he said in hopes to persuade me. “If you don't like it, I promise I'll leave it alone. Come on, give it a go.”

It's not that I felt pressured to abuse drugs for the first time in my life that evening. In recollection to my prior statements about my aging with wisdom and open–mindedness, this was where that judgment came to play. I let him hold the joint between my lips as I swallowed the muddy taste of marijuana, the prickly smog tickling my throat and lungs as it went on its journey down and straight up to my head. Like I hadn't expected to cry from the truth and bitterness of Harry's poem, I didn't expect to feel any effects of one hit in a matter of seconds. Harry elucidated the circumstance: the secondhand smoke had gotten to me before the actual weed did.

So I was driving through dusk down a road I hardly knew absolutely fucked up. The road we were on wasn't busy, which I am so appreciative for, but I could barely keep my eyes open. I was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel, of getting into an accident, of dying. But just like that, we came to a crossing.

Harry hopped out of the car as I parked in the grass, handing Loo to me and he started to strip.

“What are you doing?” I asked, my mouth feeling tingly.

“Well, we can't bring our clothes with us.”

“Why not?”

“Why would we?”

“Why wouldn't we..?”

He looked at me blankly... like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. His hands were stopped at the button on his shorts, his eyes on me, searching for something that said I wasn't serious, but found nothing, I hope. He watched the others pull up behind us, uncertain about what to do if it wasn't taking off his clothes. So he put his hair up for the third time and shut the door.

We headed out toward the river, Loo in my hands that wouldn't stop shaking. He was so small – fragile and ill – and I didn't want to hurt him. He hardly moved in my arms; he laid there breathing and grunting. I think that if anything happened to the lot of us in the dark wood, I'd have done anything to protect him whatever the cost. Assuming now, with more insight and time to reflect, perhaps the reason for my passive aggression about Loo was because Harry acted the same. He didn't let anyone touch him. All except me, and that made me feel special.

That feeling went away, however, as we got closer to the river. Harry was leading us with his flashlight and good hearing. When he decided we were certainly on the right track, he took Cas under his arm and kissed her on the lips. She swooned about the way he kissed, rested her head on his shoulder for a few seconds before leaning away from him to walk on her own. I glared at her unknowingly. I wanted to throw a rock at her.

And then Harry turned to me.

“Louis?”

“Uh–huh?”

“How long have we known each other? It's been ages, hasn't it?”

“About... fifteen years.”

He flinched. “Fifteen? I thought... Oh, but we went to nursery school together,” he recalled easily. “I've a photo of us building one of them miniature log cabins. You were crying in the picture.”

“Was I? What for?”

“I don't know... You probably crossed your legs wrong and made your feet fall asleep. You did that a lot.”

I didn't say anything back. I couldn't come up with a response, but I wanted to have one. I wanted to keep talking to him and for him to stop reverting back to Cas. It was clear to me as day that she didn't care for his company then, a fact that I couldn't comprehend if I wanted to, and yet he was distracted by her. I attempted to psych myself into starting a new conversation for it was just too late to bring up our primary one. To tell him that I, too, had a photo of us from nursery school was irrelevant and problematic because we would be dwelling in the past rather than the _now_. I craved his friendship now, and I could not live in a pathetic romantisised mindset of _The Great Gatsby_.

After a short while, we found a gate. There was no telling what Harry would do as he paced the lining, running his fingers along the wire, tricky points of condemnation about the fence being built in the first place. He announced that he'd go over first, so without hesitance, he dropped his shorts and handed Sheila his shoes and me the flashlight.

Standing there, the textured, cool scent of nature calming me far too much, I didn't realise what was happening. All I knew was that Harry was nearly bare, climbing a rusty, old fence like playing in a tree in childhood. I can remember that boy in my primary school who'd left the lesson to paint the floor and stick his hands in the toilet. How I'd thought this brand–new Harry had managed to forget him is a trouble to me, because in complete, absolute honesty, he was just the same. His skin was only tan from sun exposure, as he never used to go out in the sun. His hair was curly and long now, though I very much fancied it, and he immensely shot up. He must have been six feet tall, which is much taller than I am, still. And I bet my life that if I asked him to live in nostalgia just for a moment, he'd wander away from us and try to find his way home from there.

“Point the light on me, I can't see.”

I jerked the flashlight until it found him, his bare body beneath the moon and shining stars a rarity to my eyes that will probably never be so grateful again.

He jumped down, now separate from us all, naked and lively. The next one, as willingly as the first, quickly undressed and hopped the fence, another following, and then another and soon, I was alone behind the fence.

“Ready, Lou? Loo?”

Shrugging nervously, I began to doubt every bit of myself. “What do I do with him?” I asked, holding the kitten up for him to see.

Harry stuck his hands through a gap in the wiring, taking ill Loo and my worry about dropping him or holding his small body too tightly. “Come on,” Harry said, taking a step back. “I'll help you down. You won't get hurt, I promise.”

I know I shouldn't have been there in the first place. Mum would have killed me if she knew where I was that wasn't Niall's house, though that's where I told her I went after school – that I would be home soon to put my sisters into their pajamas. If anyone knew of the happenings there that night, the road trip, the drugs and everything in between, I would gravely suffer judgement. Possibly even get lynched like they used to do to black boys for stupid, stupid reasons. In that analogy, I'm like the small black boy who might or might not have had a small piece of food from a white man's house, or any house, and I was incredibly afraid to get punished for it. But everything I did that night, I don't regret. Not even now, living on my own, working a hard labour job, nobody else that important in my life just yet.

I stripped down to my pants, placing my shoes with everyone else's and my phone underneath one of them, and climbed the fence. Harry's hands were on me before I even needed the help. He took my ankle, and then my thigh, waiting for when I'd be ready to join them finally and grabbed me round my waist when I was, still managing me and Loo cradled in his other arm. Nothing in all my life surprised me more than Harry throwing his arm over my shoulders. It was just for a while until he handed Loo to me and went to walk alone before walking with Cas.

“Cheswold!”

We followed Steven's voice through the trees. The sticks and rocks on the ground were beginning to really hurt me, so I hurried over to the grass and fell back on my bum to get off my feet for at least a second. Niall sat down next to me, Vaine next to him and Ane next to her. The two girls lay their heads in the leaves and laced fingers, shutting their eyes to the sky and listened for the sounds of everything.

Niall and I had laid down to do the same, but we only reached silence for a moment or two before someone jumped into the river.

I peeked through my foggy eyes and saw Harry in the water. He was naked in there, his boxers in the grass and all. He swam against light tide, splashing and kicking about, which was a bit funny because he wasn't that well of a swimmer. His head was craned to stay above water, a dark mess of hair that he had taken out of its braids encircled round him, sparkling like diamonds. He called something to us about the future, but I couldn't understand what he said.

“Harry,” Cas replied, pulling her long hair into a ponytail and showing off her flawless body. “Haven't you just got over a cold? Nobody's gonna be carrying you all the way back if you get something from that water. We're going to make you walk.”

“I don't want to be carried. I'm no baby.”

She didn't say anything else to him. She turned and went far away from us to talk to Steven, not even taking a second glance in anyone’s direction.

The look on Harry's face as he watched her with Steven broke my heart. It did. I tried so hard laying in the itchy grass to figure why he ever allowed someone to hurt him so. If he loved her, which seemed very likely, he'd find the will to get out of that river and just relax. He could sit with his friends in nature and chat up his beautiful girlfriend or whatever she was until there would be nothing else to chat about and resort to only being. But he didn't do that.

He got out of the water, where I had to look at Niall who looked at the two naked girls beside him so that I wouldn't feel wrong for trying to see if Harry was still upset or not. He was absolutely naked and wet; I just couldn't look. I felt my chest tighten as he walked by, my throat forming a lump and my eyes watering from frustration or something like that.

“Louis?”

I sucked up my immaturity and forced myself to look at his face. “Yeah?”

“Let's go over there.”

We walked a good distance from the rest, stumbling upon a darker patch of night behind a couple of trees and bushes where the grass was much softer. I sat beside him, sweat building on my back and under my arms – I perfectly recall – being so near another naked man and all the sin melting between us. My mother's and God's voices ran through my head with: “You're wrong for doing this” and "You're not supposed to lust after anyone, Louis.” I wasn't sure if I was actually lusting. As far as I knew, I was beating my 8–year–old self for never having the nerve to talk to Harry in lesson; for only ever wondering why he didn't have any friends. I was thinking why, of all ways it could have happened, why did he want to go somewhere with me like _this_?

“Are you worried of losing Cas?” I asked after fighting my conscience who told me not to open my mouth.

He leaned back on his elbow and fumbled with his fingers. “Losing her?” He chuckled. “To who?”

“I don't know. Just in general.”

“No. I find it's better not to worry about stuff that's inevitable, especially when you know it's inevitable.”

“Well... doesn't it matter to you? Losing your girlfriend and everything?"

“Cassidy?”

I nodded.

“She's not my girlfriend.” He picked a little flower from the dirt and started to pull off the pedals, flicking them at my feet.

“But you're always kissing her,” I reminded him. “You always want to be with her and talk to her, you're always touching her...”

“I touch a lot of people and, yeah, I want to be with her. She's, like, my best friend.”

I felt so stupid after recognising how our conversation had taken a turn for the worst. I had warned myself, too. The tension about us was thick and slimy; it was as though the feeling latched onto me like a leech, sucking out my spirit to reassure him. I practically put the idea in his head that he was losing his best mate. I wanted to die.

“You know, Louis...” Harry placed the destroyed flower on my knee and lay on his back, crossing his hands behind his head. “In nursery school, I put glue in your hair. The teacher had to cut it out. Then you bit me so we'd be even, but you ended up getting in more trouble than I did. That's why you were crying in the picture.”

“Were we mates then?”

He laughed quietly, sighing at the thought. “I don't know. I have photos of us at birthday parties and school trips and stuff, but I can't remember if we even talked to each other.”

“Me neither. We've known each other for ages, but I don't know you.”

“Yeah, you do.”

"I know your surname," I counted off. "And I know that you have an elder sister. You're musical, artistic and... Well, that's all I've got."

He didn't speak for a second or so. The silence worried me. But he was smiling to himself, looking up at the sky past the May leaves on the tree above us. "That's pretty much it," he concluded. "You know more about me than you give yourself credit. More than some of the others know, anyway."

I laughed dryly. "Does that include Cas, as well?"

"No." He looked over at me, the most confused I'd ever seen him. "You don't like her."

"No, that's... That's not it."

"Then you fancy her. Does it bother you that we're always together?"

"I don't care about that."

He sat up on his elbows again, offering my attention to secret bits of him that I didn't much want to look at. "Then what's this tension I feel when you're with us? Is it jealousy?"

"No."

I had become incredibly annoyed by him. There was no longer anything else I might have felt besides that one horrible, unjustified, biased form of expression I tried so tediously not to show. He was fighting for an answer I hoped not to give him, called me jealous and more or less a mood–killer, and it angered me.

"If I make you uncomfortable, you can say."

And there he was. Making me all but uncomfortable and only shameful as I worry I'd hurt his feelings. However, although he was glamorous and free–spirited in the loveliest way, he had no right to make me totally hate myself for what I hadn't even said. He did make me uncomfortable with myself. But I could never admit that to him.

"I'm not jealous of you," I ultimately stated. "I don't fancy Cas and I'm sorry I always ruin your fucking mood, but since you've brought it up, you ruin your own mood. It's clear she's not into you all that much and neither are you apparently, so stop forcing yourselves on each other like fucking dogs all the time."

"Wait––"

"You straight guys, you're all so prideful. Why can't you just chat to a girl for one second without putting your hands all over them and snogging their goddamn faces off in front of everyone? You make me sick to my stomach, I swear."

Once taking a moment to collect my unexpected mark of words, he hid his face in his hand and laughed. I wanted to scream if he dare thought my opinion was funny enough to laugh at.

"Oh... Well, this is a problem," he told me seriously, sitting all the way up and away from the river. "You're full of a societal mindset, Louis. We as people can never accept anyone for who they are, and when we do, it's for the aesthetic–– The look of it. I'm trying to break free from that.

"Yeah, I kiss Cas, but now that I think of it, I kiss everyone. I don't think we should be limited to just one person to show affections for. We all love more than one person in our lives, don't we? If that's true, then why can't we show it without being labeled as something no one's even heard of or something that doesn't even apply in the first place? Since you saw me with Cas, you called me straight and figured we were dating. That's judgmental."

My eyes went wide, and then narrowed. "It is not," I argued. "I inferred it."

"What if I said you were fucking your mum 'cause you kissed her?"

"That's not the same thing!"

"It is. But I wouldn't do that and I definitely wouldn't tell you to your face." Harry dropped his head and picked a piece of grass from the ground. "Sex is sex anyway. Shag whoever you want."

Despite all he attempted to teach me, I inferred that he was gay. Or if not, he was bisexual or pansexual or some sort that's open to some other options that don't exclude everyone but females. Even if he practiced polygamy without the use of the label (which was extremely probable), he might have held an interest in men or already experienced romance with one. The idea made me both excited and sick. All of my insides did double flips that hurt my chest.

I felt the urgency to ask Harry if he ever missed Doncaster when he went away. I wanted to know if he ever missed the mates he didn't have and if he missed me, though I had forgotten him the moment he left and never thought of him until he returned. The question yanked at my hair and scratched me all over. But there was still something I wanted to know more.

"Do you like her?"

He looked up at the question it seemed I already asked one–hundred times. "Yes," he said slowly.

"But do you _like_ her? Like... enough to be with her forever or even just date her?"

"Probably not date her." He was playing my heart like a piano. "I love Cas, but I think I'd want to wait if someone else came along."

So he didn't practice polygamy.

"It's like we're already dating anyway. We go out, we kiss, have sex. There wouldn't really be a massive change besides calling us a couple. We've discussed it, it's a mutual decision not to pursue anything." His eyes fixed on me, so I couldn't let his answer quite sink in. "I know what you're doing. Before your feelings get hurt, I like you, as well. I did for a long time."

Suddenly, I wasn't sure where I was. All of the sudden, I couldn't comprehend the fact that I wasn't in primary school anymore. I was shrinking into my 8–year–old self faster than I could say "I like you, too" and there was no helping it. For no reason at all, I began to think up ways to explain to Harry that I didn't have feelings for him when we were young – that I had just gotten them and they were strangling the life out of me, yet all of the explanations sounded so childish. I couldn't think like an adult or even a college student. I wished to explode with truths about us and myself and how I was selfish, wanting every bit of him to satisfy the farther days we didn't speak. Because I never had the nerve to say something to him – _anything_ – I was making up for it now at the very last minute and was drowning in emotion I didn't get to feel before. If we would have become friends or not – if we ever were – his coming back was doing something to me.

He wouldn't stop smiling at me. And it wasn't until then that I realised how he was shivering so.

I scooted in a little. "Are you cold?"

"Oh, yeah," he laughed, flicking some wet strands of hair out of his face. "I mean, it's all right. I like being one with nature."

"I've noticed."

"Have you?"

"With you leading the lot of us into getting arse-naked, yeah, a bit."

He moved closer to me, not even pretending for discretion, and stared at my lips until he closed the small gap between us and kissed me.

We sat there, his mouth on mine. I quite needed a moment and I think he knew it. Aware he had kissed lots of people, he could be patient with someone who hardly so much as held hands with another human being. He waited for me to process what was happening, and when I had finally come to the conclusion that I was a Catholic 18–year–old bloke in the sixth form snogging the handsome, talented hippie whom everyone adored but I adored first, I chose to kiss him back.

My throat felt tight. Like I hadn't drank water in weeks. My tongue abruptly felt so dry to me that I caught myself praying with all of my soul to God it wasn't as severe as I imagine. I fear he may have tasted my thoughts as he teased my lips apart, but he didn't consider the possibility. He disregarded all of my faults as he explored my mouth, exercising his filthiest kissing techniques that turned me into a puddle of liquid ice cream.

As though I had no control of my mind or body, I climbed onto his lap and put my fingers in his freezing, damp hair. I could feel his private bits beneath me, his bare body against my skin and his was rather cold. I ran my hands along his arms and down his back to warm him up, offer him heat he was unfortunately lacking, to what caused him to exhilarate himself.

Harry splayed his hands out on my bum, perhaps unaware that grass and leaves and other things by the river were stuck to his palms, but acknowledged or not, it didn't matter. He made me feel perfect, which, by my standards, I wasn't and will never be. He went out of his way, though, to renew my self–image for the time being.

"What if they can see us?" I asked, immediately being hushed up with another kiss.

"I don't care."

It was an honest struggle to will myself away from his sinful lips. "But what about Cas?"

"What about her?" Another kiss.

"You'll hurt her feelings."

"It's just sex," Harry diverged. "I don't want to talk about her right now."

Of course he didn't want to talk about her. He was there with _me_ , not Cas. That must had been for a reason – a blessed reason – and yet I was figuring it. He wanted to have sex with me. He said it. Clear as water. But it was "just" sex. I wanted to undergo the same relationship with him that he carried out with countless others including a girl who lounged fifteen yards away with the others and Niall. Hell, if Niall spotted us together, there'd be no telling what he'd do. My body had caught fire from the inside, turned to a furnace that could withhold nothing, mania pouring out of me like one of those stew ladles with the holes in it.

I couldn't breathe. I still felt him under me, only now I _felt_ him and I felt his hands all over, his lips reverting to my neck and chest that I, too, felt would burst. There were countless things subsequent to what we had said to each other, what we talked about, and thinking of it then (especially now) it could have been avoided. If I had only offered a fire instead of my body's temperature or hadn't exposed my raging jealousy or followed a naked man into the trees like a ruthless jackass, I perhaps would have been able to walk away from it. But that was a wretched means of solution. Being me, I'd have found a way. As Harry once said, it's better not to worry about stuff that's inevitable, especially when you know it's inevitable.

Moving me, laying me down in the softer parts of the riverside grass, Harry's every touch let alone his motions making me shiver and moan, I made a start to assure myself that I wasn't in the wrong. I mustn't have been. It was just sex. Harry had told me so. Certainly he was right for experience spoke for itself, and I, a virgin, had none of that, so who was I to object? It's just sex...

He'd taken my pants off, beginning to touch me in places I had never been touched before. I couldn't bring myself to look at him. He was hypnotising me with his eyes or his sweet, poisonous kisses he'd latched onto my flesh, sucking the absolute life out of me. He was rewarding me and punishing me at once. One second I wanted him far, far away and never to touch my body again, and in the next I wanted him more than ever. Oh, how I wanted him. I wanted him to do everything he'd done with all of his other romances and fancied friends with me and then some. I wanted him to show me all of the wonders of lust and to teach me all of the things I didn't know.

Disappointingly so, I somehow managed to tangle my focus round the others walking along the riverbed who had or had not already seen us two. But after a short, disoriented time of worrying, Harry shielded my view with his hand and took my chin, capturing my lips with his.

"Don't get worked up," he whispered, channeling a compassionate persona. "Just you and me. Forget everything else."

It was easier said than done, but I did try.  
My mouth had become sore and our kisses sloppy and rushed, stealing each other's air that we desperately needed but willingly gave. Somehow, though, kisses and sex and oxygen just didn't seem enough.

"Can I give you a blowjob?"

At first, I felt weird for asking. I thought he might make a confused face and finalise that I was definitely a weird one. But fortunately for me, he agreed. However also unfortunately, I carried no knowledge on how to do what I signed up for.

Harry stood up, swiping his hands together to rid the mess on them before fixing his hair away from his face. He had stood up almost godlike, the moonlight sort of shining on him like it did when he'd first exposed his body that was the essence of not only the male anatomy, but that of the human race. Rather, he set standards over all things. Claiming that he was godlike, which is no understatement in the least, contradicted my every being and behaviour I had practiced since I was able to press my palms together and mimic my family as they bowed their hands at dinner, yet it did not seem wrong. I idolised him, gawking at his glorious manhood and glamour, in someway selecting him as a remarkably close figure to, or as close as I could morally condone, God.

I scooted along the grass to Harry's feet, and only when I conjectured that no one was looking did I lean in close, taking his pierced, intimidating member in my hand and mouth. The inclination of my body and natural person was to touch myself as I did so because I was gluttonous. I longed to touch him for months, and then as I was finally touching him someway that I never supposed would exist, it didn't entirely satisfy me.

Harry sighed, running his hands through my hair to keep me from moving too much. He'd push my head down so he could see my face and take both my hands to assure I could pleasure him with my mouth alone. I like to think I could, for he'd groan and swear under his jagged breath, pushing in a little farther, and I'd hum on him.

He released my hands and swept my fringe from my eyes. "Open," he said, working himself in front of me, my mouth slack and everything.

Now, he didn't come. Half of me was hoping he wouldn't whilst the other, more mischievous half hoped he'd come all over me, but I had proven to not just myself that a lot of me is mischievous. Harry wanted to see me obey him, nonetheless, even if I didn't earn a thing in the end. He asked me to sit on my ankles and do nothing else because he felt I was doing too much for him already.

With that, he leaned over to kiss me, demolishing my plans to please him again. He laid me on my back, a flower or two beside my head, and held my shoulders down as he straddled my waist. The kisses he planted on me were ghostly, fallen along my collarbones and cheeks like pedals. He traced his touch across my arms, our fingers locking together before he'd take his length and mine in one hand to gently work his wrist. I'm almost positive that this is called "frotting", but I could be wrong.

"Are you a virgin, Lou?" wondered Harry, petting my chest and neck.

"Yeah."

He smiled fondly. "That's lovely. I want to have sex with you, if you want to do that."

"Yeah." I had nothing else to say. My brain wouldn't work.

"You're okay with it?"

I nodded and pulled him down for a hastened kiss that he rightfully shortened to lick his fingers, reaching back where his hand disappeared for a moment and reappeared as he took my dick and hovered above me.

Harry sat forward, a bit concentrated, and then sat back. He slapped his hand on my mouth very suddenly.

I was muffled of any noise I might have made. I hadn't noticed I did make any noise, but it was obvious as Harry was forcing me quiet. Even as he started to move and he'd begin to breathe heavier, bow his head weakly from strong pleasure, he'd keep his hand on my mouth like it would keep him, too, from calling attention to what was going on behind the trees.

At some point, though, when I feverishly took his waist and he my shoulders, I discovered this string in me that hooked itself with him. I could feel my body sticking to his body. We were attached, it seemed, like flies to rotten meat. We absorbed each other like syrup and butter on pancakes. We mixed like coffee and gin, milk and tea, water and lemon in those American states. It didn't feel so much like a jealous connection, an ownership over someone who had no clue of my intent, but something more celebrated. It felt as though we were celebrating our reunion. If sex is used to bring people together who hadn't been acquainted in many years, I had obliviously been reintroducing myself wrong.

Harry ran his hands through his hair, trailing his fingers down his neck with brilliant energy and excitement for what might happen. I prayed it would happen. He made me feel a specific way about all of it. Sort of like he was doing me favour that I didn't ask for but sincerely would have if I had the confidence. Harry Styles could probably read minds. He could have read mine as I considered how amazing he looked during the peaceful night whilst swimming in the concept of me handing him my £20–worth virginity without a second thought and I wouldn't have known. He was so perfect already. Him being telepathic wouldn't surprise me.

"Ah–h–h..." Harry groaned, moving his long, tangled hair to one side. "You feel really good."

I knew there was no way I'd last longer than five minutes. There was no way in hell. And if Harry acknowledged and respected our differences in sexual activity, he'd understand. I, for one, did not.

How could I? If sex is just sex, why was it so important to me when it was foreign? Why can I be totally inexperienced at one thing and nail it the first time, but with something like this, I'm begging myself not to fail? Why is sex so weird? I can sleep for long periods of time, run long distances. I can eat my weight in waffles and keep it down, but I couldn't find the strength to last five minutes. I didn't get that being a virgin meant my stamina was poor and practically nonexistent. I didn't get that wanting something so badly didn't guarantee me any chances. I wanted to be there for hours, just me and him. But that was impossible. And I didn't know why.

He ended up making me come a little while after we began. He forced it out of me, held my hands in his so that I wouldn't touch him – a notion I fancied so much. I was sweaty, exhausted, overstimulated. I felt dead in some way. At the same time, though, I never felt more alive.

After grinding away at me, crippling me basically, a few gleaming shots of white landed on my stomach and chest. Harry was looking right at me as he finished. A look that said something I might never find out, but it was endearing and left me very, very unsurprisingly undone like a frayed sweater.

"Wow..." Harry climbed off my lap, a satisfied smile on his mouth. "That was amazing."

It wasn't clear he was complimenting me out of pity for climaxing so fast or out of praise because _he_ had climaxed so fast.

I sat up uneasily, the sensation of grass and dirt and creatures with wings all over me not being so appealing anymore. But for some strange reason as I took my pants that Harry handed to me, and as he wiped my chest clean of proof of sex, I felt sad. I felt sad, but I didn't know what for.

He seemed to have sensed this.

"Lou?" said Harry, struggling to rise to his feet from – more likely than not – being penetrated. "Where's the cat?"

I gave the cat to Niall. At the time, I didn't think it something bad, though I found a big, horrible weight of guilt latching to me. If I had known then that I would get caught up in Harry's powerfully alluring qualities that I romantisised in my own head, I'd have rethought the idea of handing off a nearly dead week–old kitten to someone who had no first clue on how to handle it. I hoped that Loo was all right with Niall and the others who were gathered round him in a beaten circle, but that (the hopefulness itself) was too much to ask for.

There was a subdued murmuring among the crowd that trickled into stealthy silence when Harry and I joined them by the water. They spread out like ants above a minuscule vibration before returning once seeing neither of us were upset. That is until spotting a little, limp Loo in Niall's hands. Niall looked disgusted carrying him. Convinced that he had a disease called _Death_ that was capable of spreading. What Niall, they, and even I, did not come to terms with was that we had already caught it. We were all dying already.

Harry conjured up a nifty carrier of leaves and twigs and placed Loo inside upon a bed of dirty little Dog Violets and Gold Yarrows and then placed the carrier in the dirty mass of water. Loo officially passed within the few moments we took to wish him well, where Harry made some ridiculous point about reincarnation.

The night fell short afterward. Taking the journey back to our parked cars, I walked alongside Niall, my hilarious blue–eyed friend, whilst Harry walked alongside his stunning, poetic not–girlfriend who held his hand and chatted through the first several silences. Somehow the combustible fact that they had something that I had never, have never and would never have with him didn't hurt me as much as it did before. Harry Styles and I knew each other once, but that was a long, long time ago, so backed up in my memory, blocked like a busy sink pipe. That must have been why he called his homely kitten Loo – that meek, grim name spelt L–O–O was inspired by a toilet, a play off my own name to prove how much I didn't matter. How much we didn't matter. To establish that what I thought... my every thought of him I clasped onto as I clasped a wasted young life was just shit. He was a clever guy. My subconscious had no intention of figuring out his notions.

The last couple weeks of college moved on smoothly. I raised my marks a few and managed to steer clear of trouble, for my mum was filled in on my absence the night I ran off to the river by a phone call with Niall's mum just two days later. Apparently Niall wasn't too great at keeping secrets, but that I should have known when he confessed to me his fooling around with one of his teachers without being asked. But which secrets he didn't know couldn't get passed along.

No one really found out about Harry and I. We were the biggest secret I have ever kept.

The others had gone as mysteriously as they arrived after meeting them once more. I have never seen them being older now, and I wonder if they were just a figment of my imagination like the connection I had with Harry, I suppose. But that was as real as my being a homosexual and his being a polygamist. Neither of us needed to make a public announcement to know those things for a fact.

The last day of sixth form, Harry wasn't in American literature. Making eye contact with him on a daily basis as one of us entered the room became instinctive after giving Loo to the river. Walking in that day, I got a blow in the gut from the heavens once seeing his desk was empty. He didn't show at theory nor the art and choir courses he wasn't actually enlisted for. I was only aware of that because a boy called Liam who was on my football team "took" those courses with him. Harry would just show up sometimes, claiming he already knew the lesson he was supposed to be at, to play piano for the choir when the director needed to print extra music, or sit–in on the art students' oil painting session. This day, though, I overheard that Harry hadn't shown up.

According to all of my statements and straightforwardness about our beautiful Harry Styles, he wasn't weird. I wasn't under the impression he was strange or simpleminded or even a hair–gluer, but he did make exquisite first impressions that I must applaud. Owning a characteristic I'm not too keen on, moreover, he was assertive, yet I couldn't bundle up any bit of bother. Not when it came to him.

I received a text message as I threw my rucksack and football at the backseat of my car. _Come over –Harry Xx._

It didn't make sense. I'd only been to his house once after his bathing in River Cheswold, but I didn't go inside. I waved him goodbye once he kissed me on the mouth twice, and just as I began to feel high and mighty, he ducked into the back and kissed Cas. The only reason Niall didn't get snogged, as well, is because he pretended to have no clue what was going on, and that was the most brilliant move of his entire youth. Getting kissed by Harry was like getting kissed by Satan. You know he doesn't care for you as much you may fancy to think, but it doesn't matter at all because he's so goddamn sinful, and, oh, does God live to polish our tongues with a taste for sin.

This unwelcoming topic that I'm recollecting journeys me to the last time I have ever spoken to Harry Styles. The two greatest magnets of all – a discomfiting pill to swallow – that can't effectively be separated are as I broached: humankind and sin and myself and my deflowerer.

Mentioning again and again throughout this story, Harry wasn't weird. I cannot stress that enough. The underlying truth of it all is that I was. I followed a boy I didn't know into a toilet, I cried over a poem that a stranger wrote, I let crippling jealousy about an unreal couple eat me alive, I allowed someone I didn't know to take my virginity and for what? Because he was a free pass into my childhood? Because he had eyes that told a story and choked me like a viper? Because his ongoing talents challenged me to be a better me? Because I got weird and fell in love with the unnerving concept of causing rejoice between the loner toilet boy and the inviting life form of mint condition who I couldn't believe were the same person? I was the weird one who threw away hygiene for weeks because Harry made physical and verbal examples that that sort of thing didn't matter; the weird one who sat to the front of the audience of a play I didn't want to see only to hear Harry on piano for the women's choir; the weird one who spent free time rehearsing ways to introduce myself to Harry as someone he knew but didn't know whatsoever. Obsessed is putting it lightly. No teeny, tiny bit of microscopic passion I ever felt for Harry was light.

Stuck on his enticement with glue, I parked near the motorway of his house after college. I remember planning on making him think I didn't care about his text message, that I'd stay at school to help some teachers pack up their rooms, but then I was bombarded by the possibility that Harry might truly believe I didn't care and revoke the invitation. So I went straight over.

Why I parked in the street was a big dilemma. There was a moving truck shielding the whole front of the house. Large men in moving company pullovers were hustling back and forth with wrapped up furniture and boxes stacked high in a hauling trailer, pushing me to walk through the grass and past a manifest "For Sale" sign in order to avoid them.

I rang the doorbell and compulsively shoved my hands into my pockets, a mania of words going hectic in my head. Naturally I worried how and when Harry got my phone number.

The door opened to an intimidatingly pretty girl's presence to whom my eyes went wide at. Her hair was long and smooth (obviously victimised by extreme dying habits) and she wore a dainty dress with white daisies on it. This is Gemma, Harry's once 12–year–old sister. But she needed to have been at least twenty in this moment. "Hello," said she.

"Hi." I started a nervous sway on my heels. "I don't know if you remember me. I'm Louis, I'm an old friend of your brother. I met you before, but we were really young."

"Yeah, of course, Louis." She smiled the sort of earnest smile that Harry often wore, slicing the tension I swam in in have. "We have photos of you. You're quite tall now."

Gemma let me in, offered food and beverage that I didn't take as she pointed me to the stairs with directions on how to not barge into the wrong room. She had grown up a bit. I could tell. I have a vague memory of her in a Power Ranger costume with a bunny rabbit plushy under her arm, so it's safe to say so.

The house, if I may add, would give you a gutted feeling. It was an average–sized house; a good–looking home to raise two children in. The walls were off–white, somewhat "eggshell" to me, with a charming tint of coral pink in the paint that the kitchen cutely wore. The ceiling was short, where in the family room a wooden ceiling assured you that the second story wouldn't collapse on your head, a cushiony, deep green carpeted floor cradling you like a baby. And, of course, where that gutted feeling blossoms is the room that was completely empty. There were a couple of flattened cardboard boxes in a pile by the kitchen and an ancient turtle aquarium that needed scrubbing sat on the counter. The house was drowning in a chapped, musty scent that I could recognise as cannabis. The smell wasn't nearly downplayed by the electric wallflowers plugged into the ports. A corridor off the kitchen lead to an open bedroom, but that headed away from the staircase I was in no hurry to climb.

The dry aroma grew more pungent the higher I went up the stairs. If there was a smog in the air, I could fathom that, but this part of the house was too dark to tell.

  
I followed the direction Gemma explained to me – to the left, last door on the right – and I was suddenly positioned at Harry's bedroom. And there was no way I mixed up the directions for the drug-y stench was obviously born here. I know I should have knocked, but I let myself right in.

He was buried in the closet when I intruded. I couldn't see him very well, the darkness and clothes hung up covering his head, but he had earbuds in, a melody distracting him as he shoveled his shoes against his chest. Besides the mess of his closet space, there wasn't much else in his heart of hearts.

Big pink stains on the carpet were the first thing I noticed. I'm unsure of what the substance was and how long it'd been there, but they were elderly people compared to the drawing pin marks littering the perimeter and jubilant hole near the open window. It appeared it was placed there yesterday. In fact, someone had emptied a bottle of whiskey on the single gold-coloured wall that was meant to secrete something behind it; you could still see hint of other colour underneath. Overall, Harry's room was a beat-up room.

I waved for his attention once I gained the slightest confidence he saw me from the corner of his eye, but he didn't. "Hey," I said, trying to dive through his music. "Harry."

He kneeled down in front of a box and dumped some shoes in it and kicked the thing outward. And then as if he was aware of my being since I drove up, he removed one earbud and peeked his face out.

His hair. He cut his hair. All of his curls. Gone. There was nothing left but a baby's handful and little fringe that must have fallen in his eyes from the fret of packing for a great trip. There was nothing covering the beauty marks on his neck and nothing to forbid the sight of the pink diamond tattoo on his nape. There was no length for braids or buns or tying it back when it got frizzy. It was a common, clean cut for a bright teenager leaving college. He looked taller without all that hair for some reason, but though I fancied his height, it shouldn't suggest I wasn't utterly thrown – perhaps appalled – by this drastic change. He looked at me, hidden by his clothes and me by his entryway, just breathlessly there.

I needed to stop staring. I brooded over him being self–conscious because I couldn't get ahold of myself. "Can I come in?" I asked, hoping my expression softened at least a little.

He nodded and retreated to the back of the closet. "Close the door."

The door shut behind me, the open area pushing me to the centre of the room.

I, again, shoved my hands into my pockets. "What are you listening to?"

"Aerosmith."

"That's good. They're really good."

He didn't reply to me. Instead he unplugged his headphones and pushed his phone across the floor to my feet. The chorus of _Crazy_ was shouting up at me. "I'm getting my shit from back here," he made to apologise. "Do you want something to drink?"

"No, thanks." I picked up his phone.

"Are you hungry?"

"No, I'm fine. Thanks, though."

"Just let me know."

My palms felt hot. "Are... Are you all right? I mean, you didn't come to college today. I was kinda wondering about you."

"Wondering? Wondering what?"

"I don't know. I just... Maybe you were ill?"

Harry sighed and came out of the closet, swiping his hands on some old threadbare jeans clinging to his legs. He rubbed his eyes, sniffled, a frown on his delicate, precious mouth. If he was upset for whatever reason, he didn't deserve to be.

I didn't know what to do other than ask what was wrong. But I didn't. I simply held onto his phone with my sweaty hands and thought of the sex we had some weeks ago. Not that I hadn't stopped thinking of it.

Yawning, scrunching up his short hair and shaking his head like he couldn't believe someone could be so sleepy to actually yawn, his face relaxed into gentle serenity. "Shit," he mumbled, gazing at me with such fatigued, sweet eyes. "Bit tired. But, no, I'm fine. I didn't go to college 'cause... you know, I didn't really want to."

"Oh." The song ended, and I quickly muted the volume before another could butt-in. "Why did you want me over?"

"I wanted to see you. Since I'm moving and that."

My heart was confused and convulsing. And he then asked me if I had listened to _Everything Will Be Alright in the End_ , the newest Weezer album at the time, to that I replied with a hum and a nod. He took his phone from my hand and started up the album from its first track, smirking at the fact that I'd turned the volume down before giving his phone back to me.

"You down for a bowl?" Harry suggested, rummaging through one of the boxes labeled FRAGILE. "My sister has this thing with her legs. We thought she had Restless Legs Syndrome, which is where you get a bad feeling in your legs when you're trying to sleep, but she gets this super horrible pain all the way to her feet in the daytime, as well. She falls over sometimes, it's actually quite funny. Anyway, we're allowed this 'cause of her pains."

The pounding of my heart was indeed making me work up a sweat. The last time I was offered drugs, I hooked–up with a guy who was "in a relationship" with a more or less mutual friend and perhaps some others I didn't know about. My brain was telling me not to accept his weed now, but my willing heart throbbing out of my chest told me to do whatever he asked of me.

We sat to his bed, the last piece of furniture in his empty room, and smoked from a small porcelain elephant figure with a "Words Are Dead" scripted along the trunk.

I watched him breathe in the taste of ash as I relished the taste of sin again. I could grasp his undiluted thoughts, a cherry to the top of mine. The diamond on the back of his neck matched in colour of the pendant he wore sometimes and was wearing now. The tattoo screamed: "Look at me, look how beautiful I am!" But Harry had always covered it with his hair that was no longer able, and if not his hair some days, a jumper with a high–set collar or a scarf. I would only see it when the weather was severely hot or humid. Never any other time. As I smoked weed out of his beaded canister, I fixated my brain on his arms. They were arms that helped me off a fence and lain me on my shoulders and wrapped round my waist when we were naked together. His left arm was spat with ink, the right almost completely bare. His lesser arm had a couple of greenish bruises in the skin and, following downwards to his hand that held the lighter, his knuckles touched by flesh breaks.

Harry ate the smoke and took my chin, whistling it out into my mouth before he kissed me. "You're so beautiful," he giggled, pecking my mouth and then my cheek.

I looked away quickly to hide my blush. "What's behind the gold paint?"

"The what?"

"That wall there."

He watched where I pointed, not quite understanding what I was getting at, but he understood soon enough. "Oh, yeah." Harry handed me the pipe and lit it. "It's a painting Gem and I did when we were young. It's been covered, I forget it's there."

I huffed out the smoke unskillfully. "Why?"

"Why's it covered?"

"Yeah."

"Uh..." He looked at the wall and laughed a rather uncomfortable laugh. "When we rented out the house, they painted over it and... I guess they didn't know you had to put the white first. And it seems like it wasn't a good paint in the first place. We did ours when I was, like, eight or something and they didn't cover it until about two years later."

A magnificent part of my mind contorted and buzzed and congratulated me on my unspeakable obsession with Harry. But not this Harry. I was being not only applauded, but given a standing ovation and encore. I could hear the clapping and cheering above the silence. They were there with me... the two Harrys. The boy I caught painting in the washroom when we were eight years old and the punctilious boy with many artistries and an open mind. They were conjoined and he, the ultimate Harry that was (I knew it all along) the _only one_ , was sitting beside me. The excitement overtook me for a longer time than it should have. I felt as though I fixed something that had been broken for years and found it more than necessary to worship my persistence the way a parasite worships its host.

I had some words tickling my lips, a fever building with the anticipation for what I longed to say. My eyes trained on Harry's face that all of a sudden seemed fully concentrated on something outside of our conversation, I could have screamed holding the weight of my brand–new discovery.

Harry stood before I could force myself not to say the things I was thinking. He got up, marched toward the door, and slammed it shut just as someone sought to open it.

"Open the fucking door!"

I jumped at the sound of aggression. Raised in a house with five girls, I was accustomed to screeching and manipulation and theft. But not that.

A man was trying to paw his way in. With the way that Harry used almost all of his strength to keep the door from getting broken down, I started to panic. There was kicking and punching and vexedly wriggling the handle, and Harry wouldn't give in.

"I'll ram your bloody door down, you don't move!"

"You're not allowed in my room!" Harry reprimanded. "Sod off!"

"Don't go and piss off your mum again, mate, she's already livid about the holes in the wall!" He attempted the handle a second time. "You better get your arse out the fucking way, you greasy, worthless twat!"

Harry maneuvered sideways and let the man rock the door on its hinges as he made the loudest, most notable entrance I had ever seen.

This man reeked of alcohol. You could smell it off the breath that exited through his nose from a mile away. A dark purple shape was formed on one side of his jaw, and he, too, had scabbed–over knuckles. He looked at the younger boy like he had engineered the most godlessness abomination of all time, lips tight and eyes wild and red. He wore a suit of torment and held some in his bunched hands alongside a bottle of whiskey that was the same colour as the one that the wall drank, too. You would have predicted someone would throw a fist sooner or later, just witnessing the light–consuming rage between the two, yet the man's grip on his madness loosened in order to take a step back and acknowledge me.

I visibly shrunk.

"So I see you've got a friend there" he said, patting Harry on the shoulder as he made his way over to me. He provided a meaty hand for me to shake cowardly, grinning down at my nervous face like it was funny to see someone fear him. "Daren, Harry's dad."

I'd never laid eyes on Harry's father before now. If someone were to have asked me, I wouldn't have thought Harry even had one.

"Louis."

"Louis, he ever tell you about me?"

"No, sir."

He remained shaking my hand that began to hurt until Harry stepped in and lightly swatted his wrist. "All right, chill out," Daren said to him. "You make like you're about to go for it, I'll ground you."

"Yeah, whatever. Are you planning on spending the night here or can you get the fuck out of my room? We're about to finish packing."

I also hadn't seen Harry short–tempered before, so it was news to me that he could muster sarcasm and bitterness into one sentence.

"I'm just talking."

"Nobody wants to talk to you. Get out."

Daren scoffed and shook his head. "See what a fucking bitch he is to me?" he laughed, to which Harry rolled his eyes. "He wasn't always like that, ya know? I used to be his favourite person. This lad here used to love me to death."

I forced a hint of a smile to disguise my discomfort, but I'm sure they saw straight through it. And even more attentive to my apprehension than I thought, Harry took his pipe from me, for holding it became too much pressure.

"You ever seen him paint?" Daren asked. "Got that from me. We used to let him paint the walls when he was younger – him and his sister. They don't do that anymore, but I hear Harry blows off courses to go to some goddamn art lessons. He sings, as well. You ever heard him sing? He doesn't when I'm round, unfortunately, but he used to when he was a wee kid, like, eight or nine.

"And did you catch him at the school play some time ago? He was on the piano at some choir bits; his name was in the programme and he was thanked onstage by the theatre director and everything. He was also in the college paper and mentioned more than just a couple times in the yearbook for shit like... I dunno, a fucking mural, outstanding contribution, winning some poetry contest with this other lass. Got £500 for it, for fuck's sake. Fucking talented this boy is, let me tell you."

As his father endlessly complimented him, Harry wore a disarmingly miserable frown. The frown wasn't just on his lips. His entire face was soaked in misery from the depths of his eyes to the tip of his nose that twitched of a nervousness overflow. He glanced back and forth from his father to the gold paint shrouding his past. The great things his father was saying was hurting him for some reason. It hurt me to know that.

"Louis, right?"

I startled at the noise this guy made when he said my name. "Yes."

"You know we got some photos of you from when you were younger?" Daren put his hand on the back of my neck and sat beside me, and Harry's eyes went wide. Despite my breath catching and my body freezing, the man set his bottle on the floor and kept talking. "I recognised you when I saw you," he told me with interest. "You look exactly the same; same exact face. You boys were inseparable when you were babies, you know that? Three years old, my son's first day of nursery school here, you two fucking played with each other like you were born together. You took naps together, shared everything, all your toys and food and that. But this fucker put some paste in your hair, didn't you, Harry?"

Harry didn't respond.

"And to get back at him, you fucking bit the kid. I couldn't even be mad. I mean, who could've been mad at a little lad like you?" He made to touch my face, but as I flinched and as Harry's hand shot out to grab him, he changed his way of passage and pushed his fingers through his hair. Daren sat there, no space at all between him and me, his leg squashed against mine and everything, in the quietude he created.

We lounged around injecting the atmosphere with poison. All that I felt was my burning skin under this man's palm and a total numbness everywhere else. Harry was watching us so intently I thought I was endangered. That if I moved any sort of way, his father would grab me or try to hit me. I knew, though, that he wouldn't. He wouldn't dare lay an abusive finger on me with how poisonous the air was. And if Daren couldn't sense it, Harry wouldn't have had a problem with stopping him.

"Pick your jaw up, Harry!" Daren reached out and smacked the boy's arm, finally releasing his hold on me. "Why do you have to look at everyone like you wanna eat 'em or eat 'em out?"

"Can you please get out?" Harry mumbled.

"So Louis can help you pack the rest of your shit?" The man slapped his hand on the top of my head, a sharp gasp gushing out of my mouth.

"Man, bugger off!" Harry forced Daren's arm down as he pulled me off the bed. "Get the fuck out of my room, fucking nosy cunt!"

"Course, mate," said the man, standing with the rest of us. "You need your room to yourself. You need your privacy, I get that. You always need privacy." He snatched up his whiskey and took a short swig before glaring at me. "You and all the others that get on with this piece of shit are pitiful. Why don't you get back on his bed and let him fuck you like he does everyone else, yeah? This twat shags anyone he can get his hands on, especially the tiny ones like you."

The gold–painted wall caught his eyes for a second. As he gazed blankly for a while, I picked apart the resemblances he shared with Harry – the sparkly eyes, the oil–painted, red lips, but as he turned back and chuckled drunkly, those qualities meant nothing.

"You know you've got a history with this family?"

My mind couldn't keep up with my ears.

"Because of you, Harry's so fucking bent and weird."

Harry winced. "What are you talking about?"

"Don't act like I'm mad, you fucker! Your mum and I knew from the start it was _this_ kid! Nobody wanted to be mates with a weird shit like you and you know it. Your dumb arse only had one friend with blue eyes, Harry!"

"You belong in a ward, Dad."

"Shut the fuck up!"

I grabbed onto Harry's arm, moving into his body as close as I could. I whispered that we'd better leave, but he refused to turn his back on someone who was so unstable.

"God, I bet you already screwed this boy. This poof. And now you've brought him up here to do it one last time before uni, haven't you? Bloody hell, it's a miracle you even met up again after how hard I tried to keep you separated since that bullshit you done at school, you fucking vandal. It's one thing to draw gay, fruity shit all over the toilet floor, but to bring _that_ into _this_ house!" He gestured to the gold wall. "To get your sister to do those fucked paintings with you! You're such a freak, Harry!"

I couldn't stop my instinct. "Leave him alone."

Daren invited a shocked expression to his face, yet ripped it right off. "You don't know shit," he said, taking another sip of whiskey. "You don't even remember how fucking bent you two were. I thought you were good friends, just close, is all, but it got _so weird_. With the... the fucking glue and the biting, it was clear to me. Mum didn't see it, but I did. I made sure of it you two wouldn't go to the same primary school, but Harry––" He blinked rapidly as though to wash the memory. "Jesus, you just had to get your dumb arse in trouble and make us transfer you. And of course _you_ , Louis, were at the next motherfucking school."

My mind was blown. And I don't mean that in a stupid way. It was like I'd been shot in the head and all the teeny, tiny bits of my brain exploded out. Ideas and true past were chasing around in there. Each day I'd seen Harry, wondered about Harry, contemplated Harry, spoken to Harry was a big, fat mess everywhere. I couldn't collect it. The minutes I spent counting on my fingers and thumbs all the times Harry made me blush in lessons, the days he and I unintentionally coordinated in colour, the opportunities he took to tag me to answer a question in literature were consuming me whole; and when my hands ran out of digits, I'd count along my toes the times Harry passively confronted the kids who'd jump in front of me in the lunch queue in year four, the hours I caught him looking at me as we learned long division, the days he scrunched down in his seat to avoid my eyes as he got called on by the teacher and wrote the answer on a little note. The vivid image of walking secretively to the washroom and crouching below the wall to find Harry painting on the floor shot out of the small hole in my head where everything was seeping out with all of my other important things like blood and cells. If I was breathing or just breathing slowly was a mystery I couldn't solve. It didn't even matter.

I peeled my hands from Harry's arm, dropping them weakly to my sides. I didn't fully discern the curse–worded argument going about the two men until it stopped. Until Harry looked back to ascertain that my touch had fled him, he was punishing his father with shame that flew straight over his head – blamed on him the hole and whiskey stain upon the wall and countless other things I didn't pick up but would probably believe.

Maybe I didn't need to say anything. Both Harry and Daren stared at me like what I had on my mind would decide their fate. That was absurd, though. I needn't say anything. They said enough.

Not even a "Thank you for having me over" sat right in my mouth. It was too dry of a pill to swallow.

I hung my head, my hand over my neck from worry that Harry's father would grab me, and rushed out of the room. It accrued to me that I wasn't thinking correctly. I was being impulsive; something that I'm really not. I hurried down the stairs and hoped that Gemma had gone somewhere I wouldn't come across on my way out. The obstacles that I did stumble upon, however, were bigger than I was. The moving men from the moving company were finishing off the last of the home, leaving me to dodge the chairs and tables they took through the front door.

I heard trudging down the staircase. Unsure of who it was that was coming after me (not that it was important), I hurried to my car.

Hopefully all of this didn't actually happen. I hope all of this is something I dreamt up after binge–watching some romance films with my sisters, but that's not the case. As my fingers flicked through my many keys (ones for home, my lockers, my mum's spares, others I was too lazy to remove), I pondered the facts of my life thus far, yet my ultimatums were endless – they traveled in circles and I couldn't pick certain points apart. All that repeated itself was the fact that I was too stupid to see that Harry and I were keeping secrets from each other all this time and neither the other knew it. _He_ kept something about me secret from _me_.

"Lou!" Harry was outside in his oversized tie–dye top, marching down across the grass and his mum's garden. "Louis, hey!"

"Piss off."

"I'm really sorry about my dad," he apologised, putting his hand on my car window. "He was supposed to be here at six. If I knew––"

"It's fine. Move." I nudged him as gently as I could, though it was somehow sad to see how responsive he was to getting pushed aside regardless.

"You're mad at me."

"I'm not mad," I mumbled, and unlocked my stupid, old car.

"Is that why you told me to piss off?"

"No, I just... I don't know."

"Is it because of him? If he made you that uncomfortable, I'll kick his arse for you."

"I don't want you to."

"What do I do then?"

Ignoring his chivalry, I opened the door and climbed into my car, blocking myself from him and his foggy, empty house. Although I acted the most impolitely as I ever in all of my years of living, fully willing to accept that there was no taking back my harshness, I sat with my hands in my lap and my keys in my hand.

"Louis!" Harry yelled, pounding on the door. "Come on, mate, open the door. I'm not about to stand here and shout at you past a window, all right? I don't want to be that guy."

"What guy?" I looked up at him through the glass. "Your father?"

"If you're mad, I get it. Tell me you're mad, you won't hurt my feelings."

"It's not about your feelings!"

"Talk to me outside." He refused to pay me any attention as I refused to open the door. "I'm not listening to you no matter what you say," Harry laughed, leaning in close so I could read his lips if I couldn't hear him properly. "Come out, then we'll talk."

Nothing seemed more tempting than jamming the key into the ignition and driving home to scream and cry about Harry's horrid father ruining my visit to his house. More than anything, I wanted to get out of that big estate that now holds nightmarish, unmentionable memories – to lock myself up in my room, unlike Harry whose room had no lock, and not come out for some good hours until I could no longer stand the smell of my own body I'd neglect to bathe again. Having a hippie's bare feet stuck to the pavement like glue to hair, a hippie that I fancied, one that's been in my life for as long as I can remember, I instead pushed my car door open and slammed Harry in the knee with it.

"I'm a lover not a fighter," Harry addressed, raising his hands in surrender. "If you want a go at me, go for it, but you'll probably feel guilty."

"So you're anti–war? You and your old man take each other's beatings 'cause you're anti-war?" His face and arms fell at that. "Because you're so much for peace and harmony, you threaten your father through me? 'Oh, I'm so sorry, Louis, that my dad placed his hand on your neck. Let me kick his arse for you, please.'"

"Don't be a child," he huffed with an eye–roll.

"So, what? You love anyone and everyone, but when it comes to your dad..?"

Harry's brows downed in upset and then anger, and his jaw fixed sideways to prove it. "You don't know him," he grumbled. "You don't know the first thing about my dad or my family. What you saw was the aftermath of... what happened last night. He was pissed, we were arguing. But you weren't there, so you don't know."

"I know he punched a hole in the wall." I started to rise to my toes, absentminded of my need to be bigger than him. "He smashed a bottle at your bedroom wall, he hit you, he talked some unforgivable, fucked up shit to you. He grabbed me and swatted me in the head just to spite you, which hurt a lot, by the way."

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine!"

"Why are you yelling?!" Harry yelled. "I'm trying to work this out and you're not making it any easier!"

"Because you and your dad were dicks to me!"

He didn't take that well. "What have I done?"

Nothing was making sense. I wanted to tell him everything and nothing. I wanted to kick him for allowing someone, kin or not, to talk about me like I was a disease, but also kiss him to blur out the abuse he suffered. I wanted to not be myself anymore because I felt so, so acidic. I felt wrong for being put into nursing with some blond kid that I cared for so much that I'd have the nerve to bite him. I felt diabolical for not recognosing said blond child who evolved into a brown, curly–haired boy and being his crush. I felt sick developing those same feelings for said boy who grew into this ravishing, never seizing to impress lad who I'd throw away promises to God for. I didn't want to be a burden. But I wanted so badly to be with him.

I was pacing the length of my car, huffing and puffing despite how strange I knew I looked, wrathfully nibbling on my thumb.

"Louis."

Ignored.

"Lou."

"No."

He sighed and ran his hands through his hair to seek comfort, but he'd cut it. "Louis," he groaned, "the last thing we need is to keep everything bottled up. Tell me what it is, I won't judge. One thing you'll learn about me is that I'm open to listening."

My feet stopped without permission. Without any of my permission whatsoever, my body was turning and walking up to Harry.

He took a small step rearward, but I stole the step right back.

"You..." I started, a growl in my voice I didn't expect. "You, Harry..." My hand rose to point in his face all on its own, transferring the raw rage that wouldn't reveal itself yet. "You better not have used me like he says you did."

"I didn't."

"Don't interrupt." He seemed to have respected that. "You let someone talk to me like some worthless dog that doesn't even deserve to be on the same planet as you. You let him grab me and hit my head and let him talk shit to you about me. He called me a poof to my face and I don't like that. He blamed me for your being gay--" In the middle of my sentence, I caught an unpleasant face he pulled that he couldn't manage to remove in time. I dropped my hand to my hip. "Pansexual," I barked.

He was laughing awkwardly. "I'm sorry, I didn't––"

"You didn't what?" I revoked with greed his opportunity to answer. "You didn't mean to invite me to yours only to be called a pitiful slut by your dad? You didn't mean to randomly hop into my car and ask me to drive you round all day and not pay for petrol? Oh, and I bet you also didn't mean to take my virginity like how you do with all the other mates you chase after and tell me how much you fancy me when in actuality, you don't like me at all? You didn't mean to fuck me over?"

Harry was entirely lost for words. It was a refreshing change to see Harry Styles struggle to find something to say to me for once. "I..." The confusion written all over him was just as visible as the tattoos. "Man, if you feel like I lied to you or used you, I didn't. I didn't have sex with you just 'cause I thought it'd be fun. I wanted to make sure you were okay with having sex with me and you said you were. I didn't mean––"

"You didn't mean what?"

"Louis, can––"

"No, tell me what you meant."

"I didn't mean for you to think I wanted you just for sex."

"What did you want me for then?" I derisively gasped, my hand on my chest and all. "I couldn't have just been a personal chauffeur to you and Cas, could I?"

"What the hell?" He looked at me like I was mad. "Are you honestly bringing her up now? Prolonged jealousy kills the spirit, you know?"

"I'm not jealous!"

"Tell me why you're so worried about her."

"I'm not worrying," I stated calmly, lowering my voice to sound all the more convincing and mature. "I was asking a question."

"And I suppose we were talking about her." It was Harry's turn to behave derisively now. "Don't talk about anybody else. This is about you and me, but since I don't mind addressing a problem, if you've got an issue with me being sexual with more than one person, just say it. It clearly wouldn't be the first time someone's hated me for it."

"I don't hate you! Why don't you get that?" My throat was burning as my hands shook. I could swear my palms bled from how tightly I bunched my fists, but it was no necessity to check. "You painted _me_ on the fucking toilet floor, not her! You think you can just tell me you've liked me for ages and have sex with me and then just piss off to nowhere?! That's not fucking fair!"

Harry's skin literally crawled. What he wanted to say, he didn't say for a long time.

Mum tells me a lot about how we want the things we can't have. She used to tell me that God has a plan for us all and somethings just aren't apart of it. I don't believe I'm supposed to be an actor or a singer despite how much I dreamt of it when I was young. I didn't expect to be happy as a footballer if that were to happen, which it has. It's sort of like how I didn't expect to cry when I heard _Paint Me a Paradise_ in American literature, a duetted poem which was originally entitled _Paint Me a Paradise on the Shit–Covered Floor_ , but for obvious reasons was shortened. My mum tries to help me figure out my sub–plans within my big plan, but I'm quite capable of figuring it on my own. I suppose unlike finding football as my true passion, the people I found to befriend in college were not meant to be claimed as mine. My friends and I were soon to be gone for uni to achieve our goals. Nobody was supposed to sacrifice their lives for the other and, though I wanted him to, Harry wouldn't follow a path that lead him somewhere that wasn't perfect. It all needed to be perfect for him – everything – and I wasn't suitable.

He told me he was going back home to Cheshire.

I cried as I helped him squish his clothes into boxes and tear down his bed post to carry out with the movers. As hard as it is to believe, I wasn't fully upset by his leaving Doncaster again. After all, Cheshire isn't really that far away. I cried over him for the millionth time because I sold my mind, body and soul to someone who didn't care about me as much as I thought.

It was early in the night, just past 6:00, when the trucks were ready.

We phoned up the others and some others, and until they arrived, I tried convincing Harry that he shouldn't leave his friends behind again. He told me something I'll never forget along with the "inevitability" quote that I keep locked away for safekeeping: "They're the new friends. I want to see my old ones." You see, "they" meant "you lot", and I was included in that lot next to Cas and Niall and everyone because I never got to know him when I knew him. I was one of "the others".

They drove down for a brief visit to say goodbye to Harry. I don't know if anyone in their right mind wouldn't want to say goodbye to Harry. He made the people round him feel special in a way they'd never imagine, so letting him go was letting yourself go if you didn't do so properly.

If it's any consolation for my poor attempt at showing my emotions to this boy, and if I ever seemed hateful or proud, I kept to myself as Harry kissed all his mates. I didn't want to throw rocks at anyone this time.

We substantially queued for his last kiss. It was our big scoop of ice cream on a hot day and a warm coat in the middle of winter. We craved it. Or at least I did.

"See you later, Cas," said Harry, putting his fingers in the girl's peach hair and pressing his lips to hers.

I watched her smile up at him. "Pulling at my hair won't make yours grow any faster, mate."

He tsked and rolled his eyes, nudging her arm as he went to kiss Ane, Steven and Vaine, and then Sheila, and then he stopped in front of me.

I couldn't bare to look at him. I was sinking in shame and humiliation from each moment I used up thinking of Harry wrongly. Why is it so _wrong_ to want something you can't have just because you know you can't have it? In the probability that I fell in love with him, I wouldn't let myself show it. Jealousy had already killed me once. If anyone had Harry whilst I still wanted him, I'd be a lonely, lonely man who keeps a dead cat as a pet.

Harry shoved his hands in his pockets as he watched me watching the ground.

I was staring at the blue nail polish on his bare feet as he wiggled his toes a bit. I really didn't think it acceptable to look him in the eye after all this, but I was still so very selfish.

We eyed each other simply. We simply looked each other in the eye and pretended as though nothing needed to be said, or perhaps we just didn't want to speak. Harry looked at me and I looked at him. I assumed he'd keep on glaring for as long as he felt like it, but the tension separated from the fondness, and he put a happy smile to his face.

"Maybe you won't be a stranger if you see me again," Harry said to me.

If I had fully taken in that this was going to be the last conversation I'd have with him, I'd have said something better. "Yeah."

"Stay in touch with yourself, man." He opened up his arms and welcomed me in.

I subsided the urged to ram into him and squeeze him so hard it'd crush his ribs - teach a lesson or two on the consequences of toying with people. But I was weak. I walked into his embrace and put my head on his shoulder, letting him wrap me up me in his arms.

"I love you, Lou," he whispered. "You're a gem to me."

"I love you, too."

I felt his hand in my hair as he stuck something behind my ear. Niall sniggered watching us, but once witnessing Harry bow his head to kiss me, he shut up. We or I should have savoured this moment with a photo or a videotaping, but knowing Harry's position as a nonmaterialistic person, I knew he'd decide keep the memory in his head alone where memories belong.

He let me go, which I had a hard time accepting. Taking my hands from his waist, he kissed my fingers goodbye, then my cheek, rubbing the back of my neck and everything. He'd done that a lot since I was grabbed there by his father. I didn't get it, but it seemed to have meant something more than just a neck rub.

Putting my hands to my sides, he noted Niall's resistance to the situation as a whole, the boy's nose turned up. That didn't stop Harry, however, from not wanting to keep him out of the completion of exercising his trademark.

"Niall..." Harry sing-songed, padding over to him which was rather funny.

"I'm not gay," Niall declared.

"Rad, mate. Me neither, so give us a snog." With that, he put his hands on the blond's shoulders and pressed a kiss to him.

Niall didn't even protest. He stood there and took it like medicine, which is what it rightfully was. Harry's kiss was the juice of Aloe Vera treated to a burning cut. Niall was wounded on the inside, I suppose, for he closed his eyes to Harry's remedy, uncontrollably leaning into it.

"Keep on keeping on," Harry said to my blue-eyed friend. "And I'll lose your number, yeah?"

"Yeah, would you?"

He grinned, touching the back of his neck where his diamond was. It appeared painful as he took a few steps back, like it were a crime, but he, I guess, enjoyed or was immune to the pain of leaving. His eyes were sad, yet he smiled right through the sadness. "See you lot some other time."

That was the last time I saw him. He smiled at me and them and climbed into his parents' car, lead off the moving company van towards Holmes Chapel, Cheshire where they'd disappear forever. It didn't hit me straightaway. I gathered the idea that he was moving back home, but the cold, hard truth of the circumstance was that he wouldn't return this time. I didn't grasp it. If he in someway didn't stay in Holmes Chapel for as long as I subconsciously presumed, he certainly hasn't come back here. I don't know why he would. His parents' home has been painted over and bought by some other family with a three-legged dog. If I'm correct, the house was put under construction for expansion last year. Harry had nothing to come back to this time unless he sought to visit the castle, but that seems unlikely and not Harry at all. There was no more college to excuse his returning to Doncaster if he chose to do that. Only university could act as a potential reason to bring him back though he was already enrolled in Wales by the time school started again.

I went to school for football. Niall took a gap year to courageously explore his sexuality and later pursued orthodontics. (By courageous, I mean he slept around and had an STD for a few weeks.) I saw him every now and then during holidays and one summer we weren't both up to our throats in work and studies. I'd visit Niall in the orthodontic office to see how things happened, how the equipment was used and everything, and Niall would come to see some games of mine.

There was one match in particular which I remember indulgently. We played for charity, and as a result of that, we had a big turnout. It was a Friday in December and we were winning by a couple points. Why I remember this match above all others is because Harry had shown up.

I saw him in the stands with some student-aged boys. He was far from the field and buried in a heap of jumpy, cheering crowds splashing about their lager and popcorn, but I could recognise that face anywhere. His hair was long again. He wore a baseball cap backwards on his head and a strangely patterned football jersey of sort and a smile. That award winning smile that made my heart melt. I had to give my all into the game, so I was unable to squint into the blurred bugs flying by until we won. But by the time the finishing goal was made and I looked round the stands, Harry was gone.

Niall tells me it was a mistake. So does my mum. They do love making me feel I'm going mad, but I haven't. If I had gone absolutely, undoubtedly mad starting with the day Harry left, that would mean I haven't let go of my jealousy... If I'm still jealous after all this time, then I don't know what's wrong with me.

I can't help but be jealous if I am still. I've never held an everlasting grudge before. If I could rip it off of me and broil it or do whatever can destroy it fastest, I would. I don't like being jealous of people and places and things I don't know. I despise the feeling. I'm jealous of anyone who sees, talks to, touches, engages with him in anyway that I don't anymore. I'm jealous of where he is right now that isn't here. I'm jealous of who he's with physically and who he's with romantically and sexually. And if he's with no one in any of those aspects, then I'm jealous of him for being able to go about his life without missing me like I miss him. I don't want to admit it - that I'm severely damaged and obsessive over my youth that's been ruined by one boy who had only the single intention of making himself happy - but I've already done that. I've disclosed the biggest secret of my life, and it's all here, even if no one will read this. This is me letting go of the burden that is the memory of him. Hopefully I can relax now and get over it. After five bloody years.

Harry climbed into his father's truck which Gemma was driving, excitedly offering a peace sign to us 18-year-old kids as he hung out of the open door of the slowly moving vehicle. "Eat your candy with the pork and beans!" he shouted, laughing as his dad supposedly did.

Steven raised Harry a middle finger.

"Right on, man." Harry shut the passenger door, sticking his head out of the window right after. "Keep it real, guys."

His friends hollered things to him that he found funny as Gemma drove him away. They screamed references to drugs and sex and usual teenager things. After a moment, though, I'm sure Harry couldn't make out their words anymore. Not over the engines of the moving trucks and his stereo brilliantly strumming the intro of _The Futurescope Trilogy_. I want to believe I could hear him doing an eccentric beat to the drum as the trucks continued on through the estate, but they must had been too far down the street at that point.

Harry's voice echoed in my head for a long time as his smile stained the matter of my mind, the touch and presence he etched on me permanently branded.

Niall groaned of boredom and swung his arms exhaustedly. "Right, I'm going," he announced as the others apparently thought the same. "My brother's making me pick up some cigs. Wanna come?"

"Can I go to yours?"

"I reckon so. But take that shit out your hair first."

Unable to recall, I became confused as I reached behind my right ear. The thing there felt like a chewed pencil. Surprisingly unsurprising, it was a joint with a white, petite flower poking out the end of it. What to do with a five-inch blunt...

Weighing the dilemma and considering my feelings that yet impaled me, it being the only material from such an unforgettable boy I had ever and would ever have, I asked Sheila for a light and singlehandedly smoked the entire thing. I got high on top of a high. Apparently I went on a strange trip (though I don't remember) where I, according to Niall's mum, barked at her dog, soiled all of their bananas by shoving them whole down my throat, and hid in the utility closet once Niall's brother Greg came downstairs for his cigarettes. Somehow I was afraid he'd hit me, but that didn't stop him from squeezing the back of my neck for a laugh. I cried all night, says Niall, and eventually tried to steal his car keys to drive to Harry's house in order to chip off the gold paint.


End file.
